Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosopher Averroes who worked to reconcile the theology of Islam with the rationality of Aristotle, achieving both fame and infamy.

5 October 2006

listen ↗

Featuring: Amira Bennison, Peter Adamson, Anthony Kenny

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the scientist, writer, printer, diplomat and American founding father Benjamin Franklin.

1 March 2012

listen ↗

Featuring: Simon Middleton, Simon Newman, Patricia Fara

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the influential 20th-century British thinker Bertrand Russell, widely regarded as one of the founders of Analytical philosophy.

6 December 2012

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Mike Beaney, Hilary Greaves

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosophy of Confucius, a body of ideas which, more than any other philosophy, has defined what it is to be Chinese.

1 November 2001

listen ↗

Featuring: Frances Wood, Tim Barrett, Tao Tao Liu

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of David Hume, the philosopher and leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment.

6 October 2011

listen ↗

Featuring: Peter Millican, Helen Beebee, James Harris

Melvyn Bragg discusses the achievements of Charles Dickens What is his political and literary legacy to our age?

12 July 2001

listen ↗

Featuring: Rosemary Ashton, Michael Slater, John Bowen

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the work of the philosopher, politician and writer Edmund Burke, whose views on revolution in America and France were hugely influential.

3 June 2010

listen ↗

Featuring: Karen O'Brien, Richard Bourke, John Keane

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and ideas of the writer of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, one of the most celebrated works of its kind.

17 June 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: David Womersley, Charlotte Roberts, Karen O’Brien

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus, one of the most significant figures of the Renaissance.

9 February 2012

listen ↗

Featuring: Diarmaid MacCulloch, Eamon Duffy, Jill Kraye

Melvyn Bragg discusses the great German polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe - novelist, dramatist, poet, humanist, scientist and philosopher.

6 April 2006

listen ↗

Featuring: Tim Blanning, Sarah Colvin, W. Daniel Wilson

Melvyn Bragg assesses the scientific legacy of the 18th century German poet and thinker Goethe, who gave us the term morphology and is sometimes even credited with inventing biology itself.

10 February 2000

listen ↗

Featuring: Nicholas Boyle, Simon Schaffer

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas of Hannah Arendt who examined totalitarianism and politics and, when covering the Eichmann trial, explored 'the banality of evil'.

2 February 2017

listen ↗

Featuring: Lyndsey Stonebridge, Frisbee Sheffield, Robert Eaglestone

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Hegel's ideas on history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom, and whether we enjoy more freedom now than those in past centuries.

26 May 2022

listen ↗

Featuring: Sally Sedgwick, Robert Stern, Stephen Houlgate

Melvyn Bragg discusses Thomas Hobbes, the great 17th century philosopher who famously said that ungoverned man lived a life that was ‘solitary, poor, brutish and short’.

1 December 2005

listen ↗

Featuring: Quentin Skinner, David Wootton, Annabel Brett

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of the Argentinian master of the short story, Jorge Luis Borges.

4 January 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: Edwin Williamson, Efraín Kristal, Evelyn Fishburn

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce's groundbreaking 1916 novel about growing up in Catholic Ireland.

26 November 2009

listen ↗

Featuring: Roy Foster, Katherine Mullin, Jeri Johnson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Kant's ideas on how the world depends on us, on the limits of human knowledge and why we are bound to ask questions we cannot answer.

3 June 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Fiona Hughes, Anil Gomes, John Callanan

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rich and radical ideas of Soren Kierkegaard, often called the father of Existentialism.

20 March 2008

listen ↗

Featuring: Jonathan Rée, Clare Carlisle, John Lippitt

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.

23 May 2013

listen ↗

Featuring: Adam Kuper, Christina Howells, Vincent Debaene

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, meditations and reputation of this stoic and philosopher king, who Machiavelli called the last of the 'Five Good Emperors'.

25 February 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Simon Goldhill, Angie Hobbs, Catharine Edwards

Melvyn Bragg discusses Karl Marx who once said that while other philosophers wanted to interpret the world, he wanted to change it. And he changed the world with his Communist Manifesto.

14 July 2005

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Francis Wheen, Gareth Stedman Jones

Melvyn Bragg discusses the 19th century political philosopher John Stuart Mill and his treatise On Liberty which is one of the sacred texts of liberalism.

18 May 2006

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Janet Radcliffe Richards, Alan Ryan

Melvyn Bragg examines the literary and political career of the 17th century poet John Milton, examining work such as Paradise Lost as well as his role as propagandist during the English Civil War.

7 March 2002

listen ↗

Featuring: John Carey, Lisa Jardine, Blair Worden

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of Michel de Montaigne. Best known for his influential Essays, Montaigne is regarded as the father of modern sceptical thought.

25 April 2013

listen ↗

Featuring: David Wootton, Terence Cave, Felicity Green

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Nietzsche's influential ideas about what it means to be moral.

12 January 2017

listen ↗

Featuring: Stephen Mulhall, Fiona Hughes, Keith Ansell-Pearson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and ideas of the Russian prince who became an anarchist and who argued that mutual aid was the key to evolution not survival of the fittest

24 February 2022

listen ↗

Featuring: Ruth Kinna, Lee Dugatkin, Simon Dixon

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss arguably the most personal of Plato's dialogues in which he examines the values that led to the execution of his mentor Socrates by drinking hemlock

25 November 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Angie Hobbs, Frisbee Sheffield, Fiona Leigh

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosopher Karl Popper, author of The Open Society and a seminal thinker about science.

8 February 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: John Worrall, Anthony O'Hear, Nancy Cartwright

Melvyn Bragg discusses the life and achievements of the 19th century French novelist Marcel Proust whose 3000 page work À La Recherche du Temps Perdu has been called the definitive modern novel.

17 April 2003

listen ↗

Featuring: Jacqueline Rose, Malcolm Bowie, Robert Fraser

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas and influence of the Greek mathematician Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans.

10 December 2009

listen ↗

Featuring: Ian Stewart, Serafina Cuomo, John O'Connor

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Rousseau's ideas on how to educate children so they retain their natural selves and are not corrupted by society.

10 October 2019

listen ↗

Featuring: Richard Whatmore, Caroline Warman, Denis McManus

Melvyn Bragg discusses the life and works of French novelist, playwright and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

7 October 2004

listen ↗

Featuring: Jonathan Rée, Benedict O'Donohoe, Christina Howells

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and his extraordinary influence.

29 October 2009

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Beatrice Han-Pile, Christopher Janaway

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Simone de Beauvoir - her work on existentialist ethics, philosophy and literature and her influence on feminism.

22 October 2015

listen ↗

Featuring: Christina Howells, Margaret Atack, Ursula Tidd

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the iconic Greek philosopher Socrates. He is the founder of Western philosophy, he was funny, irritating and rude but left not a single word in his own hand.

27 September 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: Angie Hobbs, David Sedley, Paul Millett

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosopher Spinoza whose profound and complex ideas about God had him celebrated as an atheist in the 18th century.

3 May 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: Jonathan Rée, Sarah Hutton, John Cottingham

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Chinese military adviser Sun Tzu from the 6th century BC and the influential work of military strategy associated with him, The Art of War.

1 March 2018

listen ↗

Featuring: Hilde de Weerdt, Tim Barrett, Imre Galambos

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense, which was published in 1776 and bolstered support for American independence.

21 January 2016

listen ↗

Featuring: Kathleen Burk, Nicholas Guyatt, Peter Thompson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the American 19th century writer and philosopher, Henry David Thoreau

15 January 2009

listen ↗

Featuring: Kathleen Burk, Tim Morris, Stephen Fender

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Alexis de Tocqueville and his study of the American democratic system, written as an example to France of how democracy might develop there.

22 March 2018

listen ↗

Featuring: Robert Gildea, Susan-Mary Grant, Jeremy Jennings

Melvyn Bragg discusses the life and times of the 19th century Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, whose novels such as War and Peace gave expression to the compelling moral and social questions of their day.

25 April 2002

listen ↗

Featuring: A. N. Wilson, Catriona Kelly, Sarah Hudspith

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the remarkable philosopher and critic whose ideas, developed in the 1930s, became highly influential after his death while escaping the Holocaust.

10 February 2022

listen ↗

Featuring: Esther Leslie, Kevin McLaughlin, Carolin Duttlinger

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Max Weber's book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

27 March 2014

listen ↗

Featuring: Peter Ghosh, Sam Whimster, Linda Woodhead

Melvyn Bragg and guests Jonathan Ree, John Haldane and Gwen Griffith-Dickson discuss The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James.

13 May 2010

listen ↗

Featuring: Jonathan Rée, John Haldane, Gwen Griffith-Dickson

Melvyn Bragg discusses how Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the greatest philosophers of the modern age has influenced contemporary culture with his ideas on language.

4 December 2003

listen ↗

Featuring: Ray Monk, Barry Smith, Marie McGinn

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the ancient Greek historian and soldier Xenophon.

26 May 2011

listen ↗

Featuring: Paul Cartledge, Edith Hall, Simon Goldhill

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosopher Averroes who worked to reconcile the theology of Islam with the rationality of Aristotle, achieving both fame and infamy.

5 October 2006

listen ↗

Featuring: Amira Bennison, Peter Adamson, Anthony Kenny

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the scientist, writer, printer, diplomat and American founding father Benjamin Franklin.

1 March 2012

listen ↗

Featuring: Simon Middleton, Simon Newman, Patricia Fara

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosophy of Confucius, a body of ideas which, more than any other philosophy, has defined what it is to be Chinese.

1 November 2001

listen ↗

Featuring: Frances Wood, Tim Barrett, Tao Tao Liu

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of David Hume, the philosopher and leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment.

6 October 2011

listen ↗

Featuring: Peter Millican, Helen Beebee, James Harris

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the work of the philosopher, politician and writer Edmund Burke, whose views on revolution in America and France were hugely influential.

3 June 2010

listen ↗

Featuring: Karen O'Brien, Richard Bourke, John Keane

Melvyn Bragg discusses the great German polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe - novelist, dramatist, poet, humanist, scientist and philosopher.

6 April 2006

listen ↗

Featuring: Tim Blanning, Sarah Colvin, W. Daniel Wilson

Melvyn Bragg assesses the scientific legacy of the 18th century German poet and thinker Goethe, who gave us the term morphology and is sometimes even credited with inventing biology itself.

10 February 2000

listen ↗

Featuring: Nicholas Boyle, Simon Schaffer

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas of Hannah Arendt who examined totalitarianism and politics and, when covering the Eichmann trial, explored 'the banality of evil'.

2 February 2017

listen ↗

Featuring: Lyndsey Stonebridge, Frisbee Sheffield, Robert Eaglestone

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Hegel's ideas on history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom, and whether we enjoy more freedom now than those in past centuries.

26 May 2022

listen ↗

Featuring: Sally Sedgwick, Robert Stern, Stephen Houlgate

Melvyn Bragg discusses Thomas Hobbes, the great 17th century philosopher who famously said that ungoverned man lived a life that was ‘solitary, poor, brutish and short’.

1 December 2005

listen ↗

Featuring: Quentin Skinner, David Wootton, Annabel Brett

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Kant's ideas on how the world depends on us, on the limits of human knowledge and why we are bound to ask questions we cannot answer.

3 June 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Fiona Hughes, Anil Gomes, John Callanan

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rich and radical ideas of Soren Kierkegaard, often called the father of Existentialism.

20 March 2008

listen ↗

Featuring: Jonathan Rée, Clare Carlisle, John Lippitt

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.

23 May 2013

listen ↗

Featuring: Adam Kuper, Christina Howells, Vincent Debaene

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, meditations and reputation of this stoic and philosopher king, who Machiavelli called the last of the 'Five Good Emperors'.

25 February 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Simon Goldhill, Angie Hobbs, Catharine Edwards

Melvyn Bragg discusses Karl Marx who once said that while other philosophers wanted to interpret the world, he wanted to change it. And he changed the world with his Communist Manifesto.

14 July 2005

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Francis Wheen, Gareth Stedman Jones

Melvyn Bragg discusses the 19th century political philosopher John Stuart Mill and his treatise On Liberty which is one of the sacred texts of liberalism.

18 May 2006

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Janet Radcliffe Richards, Alan Ryan

Melvyn Bragg examines the literary and political career of the 17th century poet John Milton, examining work such as Paradise Lost as well as his role as propagandist during the English Civil War.

7 March 2002

listen ↗

Featuring: John Carey, Lisa Jardine, Blair Worden

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of Michel de Montaigne. Best known for his influential Essays, Montaigne is regarded as the father of modern sceptical thought.

25 April 2013

listen ↗

Featuring: David Wootton, Terence Cave, Felicity Green

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Nietzsche's influential ideas about what it means to be moral.

12 January 2017

listen ↗

Featuring: Stephen Mulhall, Fiona Hughes, Keith Ansell-Pearson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and ideas of the Russian prince who became an anarchist and who argued that mutual aid was the key to evolution not survival of the fittest

24 February 2022

listen ↗

Featuring: Ruth Kinna, Lee Dugatkin, Simon Dixon

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss arguably the most personal of Plato's dialogues in which he examines the values that led to the execution of his mentor Socrates by drinking hemlock

25 November 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Angie Hobbs, Frisbee Sheffield, Fiona Leigh

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosopher Karl Popper, author of The Open Society and a seminal thinker about science.

8 February 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: John Worrall, Anthony O'Hear, Nancy Cartwright

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas and influence of the Greek mathematician Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans.

10 December 2009

listen ↗

Featuring: Ian Stewart, Serafina Cuomo, John O'Connor

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Rousseau's ideas on how to educate children so they retain their natural selves and are not corrupted by society.

10 October 2019

listen ↗

Featuring: Richard Whatmore, Caroline Warman, Denis McManus

Melvyn Bragg discusses the life and works of French novelist, playwright and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

7 October 2004

listen ↗

Featuring: Jonathan Rée, Benedict O'Donohoe, Christina Howells

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and his extraordinary influence.

29 October 2009

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Beatrice Han-Pile, Christopher Janaway

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the French philosopher and social activist Simone Weil. Admired by Albert Camus and Iris Murdoch, she achieved a great deal in her short life.

15 November 2012

listen ↗

Featuring: Beatrice Han-Pile, Stephen Plant, David Levy

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Simone de Beauvoir - her work on existentialist ethics, philosophy and literature and her influence on feminism.

22 October 2015

listen ↗

Featuring: Christina Howells, Margaret Atack, Ursula Tidd

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the iconic Greek philosopher Socrates. He is the founder of Western philosophy, he was funny, irritating and rude but left not a single word in his own hand.

27 September 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: Angie Hobbs, David Sedley, Paul Millett

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosopher Spinoza whose profound and complex ideas about God had him celebrated as an atheist in the 18th century.

3 May 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: Jonathan Rée, Sarah Hutton, John Cottingham

Melvyn Bragg discusses the life of Siddhartha Gautama, the originator of Buddhism, and examines why his teachings have now become one of the fastest growing religions of the Western world.

14 March 2002

listen ↗

Featuring: Peter Harvey, Kate Crosby, Mahinda Deegalle

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense, which was published in 1776 and bolstered support for American independence.

21 January 2016

listen ↗

Featuring: Kathleen Burk, Nicholas Guyatt, Peter Thompson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the American 19th century writer and philosopher, Henry David Thoreau

15 January 2009

listen ↗

Featuring: Kathleen Burk, Tim Morris, Stephen Fender

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Alexis de Tocqueville and his study of the American democratic system, written as an example to France of how democracy might develop there.

22 March 2018

listen ↗

Featuring: Robert Gildea, Susan-Mary Grant, Jeremy Jennings

Melvyn Bragg discusses the life and times of the 19th century Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, whose novels such as War and Peace gave expression to the compelling moral and social questions of their day.

25 April 2002

listen ↗

Featuring: A. N. Wilson, Catriona Kelly, Sarah Hudspith

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the remarkable philosopher and critic whose ideas, developed in the 1930s, became highly influential after his death while escaping the Holocaust.

10 February 2022

listen ↗

Featuring: Esther Leslie, Kevin McLaughlin, Carolin Duttlinger

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Max Weber's book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

27 March 2014

listen ↗

Featuring: Peter Ghosh, Sam Whimster, Linda Woodhead

Melvyn Bragg and guests Jonathan Ree, John Haldane and Gwen Griffith-Dickson discuss The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James.

13 May 2010

listen ↗

Featuring: Jonathan Rée, John Haldane, Gwen Griffith-Dickson

Melvyn Bragg discusses how Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the greatest philosophers of the modern age has influenced contemporary culture with his ideas on language.

4 December 2003

listen ↗

Featuring: Ray Monk, Barry Smith, Marie McGinn

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the ancient Greek historian and soldier Xenophon.

26 May 2011

listen ↗

Featuring: Paul Cartledge, Edith Hall, Simon Goldhill

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Aldous Huxley's dystopian 1932 novel Brave New World and its vision of a future of test tube babies, free love and round-the-clock surveillance.

9 April 2009

listen ↗

Featuring: David Bradshaw, Daniel Pick, Michèle Barrett

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosopher Averroes who worked to reconcile the theology of Islam with the rationality of Aristotle, achieving both fame and infamy.

5 October 2006

listen ↗

Featuring: Amira Bennison, Peter Adamson, Anthony Kenny

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the scientist, writer, printer, diplomat and American founding father Benjamin Franklin.

1 March 2012

listen ↗

Featuring: Simon Middleton, Simon Newman, Patricia Fara

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the influential 20th-century British thinker Bertrand Russell, widely regarded as one of the founders of Analytical philosophy.

6 December 2012

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Mike Beaney, Hilary Greaves

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosophy of Confucius, a body of ideas which, more than any other philosophy, has defined what it is to be Chinese.

1 November 2001

listen ↗

Featuring: Frances Wood, Tim Barrett, Tao Tao Liu

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the work of the philosopher, politician and writer Edmund Burke, whose views on revolution in America and France were hugely influential.

3 June 2010

listen ↗

Featuring: Karen O'Brien, Richard Bourke, John Keane

Melvyn Bragg discusses the great German polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe - novelist, dramatist, poet, humanist, scientist and philosopher.

6 April 2006

listen ↗

Featuring: Tim Blanning, Sarah Colvin, W. Daniel Wilson

Melvyn Bragg assesses the scientific legacy of the 18th century German poet and thinker Goethe, who gave us the term morphology and is sometimes even credited with inventing biology itself.

10 February 2000

listen ↗

Featuring: Nicholas Boyle, Simon Schaffer

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas of Hannah Arendt who examined totalitarianism and politics and, when covering the Eichmann trial, explored 'the banality of evil'.

2 February 2017

listen ↗

Featuring: Lyndsey Stonebridge, Frisbee Sheffield, Robert Eaglestone

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Hegel's ideas on history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom, and whether we enjoy more freedom now than those in past centuries.

26 May 2022

listen ↗

Featuring: Sally Sedgwick, Robert Stern, Stephen Houlgate

Melvyn Bragg discusses Thomas Hobbes, the great 17th century philosopher who famously said that ungoverned man lived a life that was ‘solitary, poor, brutish and short’.

1 December 2005

listen ↗

Featuring: Quentin Skinner, David Wootton, Annabel Brett

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the growing prominence of the philosophy of one of the most celebrated novelists of the 20th century, who developed her ideas in response to WWII.

21 October 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Anil Gomes, Anne Rowe, Miles Leeson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of the Argentinian master of the short story, Jorge Luis Borges.

4 January 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: Edwin Williamson, Efraín Kristal, Evelyn Fishburn

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Kant's ideas on how the world depends on us, on the limits of human knowledge and why we are bound to ask questions we cannot answer.

3 June 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Fiona Hughes, Anil Gomes, John Callanan

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rich and radical ideas of Soren Kierkegaard, often called the father of Existentialism.

20 March 2008

listen ↗

Featuring: Jonathan Rée, Clare Carlisle, John Lippitt

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.

23 May 2013

listen ↗

Featuring: Adam Kuper, Christina Howells, Vincent Debaene

Melvyn Bragg discusses Karl Marx who once said that while other philosophers wanted to interpret the world, he wanted to change it. And he changed the world with his Communist Manifesto.

14 July 2005

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Francis Wheen, Gareth Stedman Jones

Melvyn Bragg discusses the 19th century political philosopher John Stuart Mill and his treatise On Liberty which is one of the sacred texts of liberalism.

18 May 2006

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Janet Radcliffe Richards, Alan Ryan

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of Michel de Montaigne. Best known for his influential Essays, Montaigne is regarded as the father of modern sceptical thought.

25 April 2013

listen ↗

Featuring: David Wootton, Terence Cave, Felicity Green

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Nietzsche's influential ideas about what it means to be moral.

12 January 2017

listen ↗

Featuring: Stephen Mulhall, Fiona Hughes, Keith Ansell-Pearson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and ideas of the Russian prince who became an anarchist and who argued that mutual aid was the key to evolution not survival of the fittest

24 February 2022

listen ↗

Featuring: Ruth Kinna, Lee Dugatkin, Simon Dixon

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss arguably the most personal of Plato's dialogues in which he examines the values that led to the execution of his mentor Socrates by drinking hemlock

25 November 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Angie Hobbs, Frisbee Sheffield, Fiona Leigh

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosopher Karl Popper, author of The Open Society and a seminal thinker about science.

8 February 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: John Worrall, Anthony O'Hear, Nancy Cartwright

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas and influence of the Greek mathematician Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans.

10 December 2009

listen ↗

Featuring: Ian Stewart, Serafina Cuomo, John O'Connor

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Rousseau's ideas on how to educate children so they retain their natural selves and are not corrupted by society.

10 October 2019

listen ↗

Featuring: Richard Whatmore, Caroline Warman, Denis McManus

Melvyn Bragg discusses the life and works of French novelist, playwright and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

7 October 2004

listen ↗

Featuring: Jonathan Rée, Benedict O'Donohoe, Christina Howells

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and his extraordinary influence.

29 October 2009

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Beatrice Han-Pile, Christopher Janaway

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the French philosopher and social activist Simone Weil. Admired by Albert Camus and Iris Murdoch, she achieved a great deal in her short life.

15 November 2012

listen ↗

Featuring: Beatrice Han-Pile, Stephen Plant, David Levy

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Simone de Beauvoir - her work on existentialist ethics, philosophy and literature and her influence on feminism.

22 October 2015

listen ↗

Featuring: Christina Howells, Margaret Atack, Ursula Tidd

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the iconic Greek philosopher Socrates. He is the founder of Western philosophy, he was funny, irritating and rude but left not a single word in his own hand.

27 September 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: Angie Hobbs, David Sedley, Paul Millett

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosopher Spinoza whose profound and complex ideas about God had him celebrated as an atheist in the 18th century.

3 May 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: Jonathan Rée, Sarah Hutton, John Cottingham

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Chinese military adviser Sun Tzu from the 6th century BC and the influential work of military strategy associated with him, The Art of War.

1 March 2018

listen ↗

Featuring: Hilde de Weerdt, Tim Barrett, Imre Galambos

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense, which was published in 1776 and bolstered support for American independence.

21 January 2016

listen ↗

Featuring: Kathleen Burk, Nicholas Guyatt, Peter Thompson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the American 19th century writer and philosopher, Henry David Thoreau

15 January 2009

listen ↗

Featuring: Kathleen Burk, Tim Morris, Stephen Fender

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Alexis de Tocqueville and his study of the American democratic system, written as an example to France of how democracy might develop there.

22 March 2018

listen ↗

Featuring: Robert Gildea, Susan-Mary Grant, Jeremy Jennings

Melvyn Bragg discusses the life and times of the 19th century Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, whose novels such as War and Peace gave expression to the compelling moral and social questions of their day.

25 April 2002

listen ↗

Featuring: A. N. Wilson, Catriona Kelly, Sarah Hudspith

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the remarkable philosopher and critic whose ideas, developed in the 1930s, became highly influential after his death while escaping the Holocaust.

10 February 2022

listen ↗

Featuring: Esther Leslie, Kevin McLaughlin, Carolin Duttlinger

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Max Weber's book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

27 March 2014

listen ↗

Featuring: Peter Ghosh, Sam Whimster, Linda Woodhead

Melvyn Bragg discusses how Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the greatest philosophers of the modern age has influenced contemporary culture with his ideas on language.

4 December 2003

listen ↗

Featuring: Ray Monk, Barry Smith, Marie McGinn

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Al-Kindi, often described as the first philosopher in the Arabic tradition.

28 June 2012

listen ↗

Featuring: Hugh Kennedy, James Montgomery, Amira Bennison

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Aldous Huxley's dystopian 1932 novel Brave New World and its vision of a future of test tube babies, free love and round-the-clock surveillance.

9 April 2009

listen ↗

Featuring: David Bradshaw, Daniel Pick, Michèle Barrett

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosopher Averroes who worked to reconcile the theology of Islam with the rationality of Aristotle, achieving both fame and infamy.

5 October 2006

listen ↗

Featuring: Amira Bennison, Peter Adamson, Anthony Kenny

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Avicenna, among the most important philosophers in the history of Islam.

8 November 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: Peter Adamson, Amira Bennison, Nader El-Bizri

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the scientist, writer, printer, diplomat and American founding father Benjamin Franklin.

1 March 2012

listen ↗

Featuring: Simon Middleton, Simon Newman, Patricia Fara

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas of Henri Bergson on how our experience of time as a duration differs from the scientific measurement of time, and why that matters.

9 May 2019

listen ↗

Featuring: Keith Ansell-Pearson, Emily Thomas, Mark Sinclair

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the influential 20th-century British thinker Bertrand Russell, widely regarded as one of the founders of Analytical philosophy.

6 December 2012

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Mike Beaney, Hilary Greaves

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosophy of Confucius, a body of ideas which, more than any other philosophy, has defined what it is to be Chinese.

1 November 2001

listen ↗

Featuring: Frances Wood, Tim Barrett, Tao Tao Liu

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of David Hume, the philosopher and leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment.

6 October 2011

listen ↗

Featuring: Peter Millican, Helen Beebee, James Harris

Melvyn Bragg discusses the great German polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe - novelist, dramatist, poet, humanist, scientist and philosopher.

6 April 2006

listen ↗

Featuring: Tim Blanning, Sarah Colvin, W. Daniel Wilson

Melvyn Bragg assesses the scientific legacy of the 18th century German poet and thinker Goethe, who gave us the term morphology and is sometimes even credited with inventing biology itself.

10 February 2000

listen ↗

Featuring: Nicholas Boyle, Simon Schaffer

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas of Hannah Arendt who examined totalitarianism and politics and, when covering the Eichmann trial, explored 'the banality of evil'.

2 February 2017

listen ↗

Featuring: Lyndsey Stonebridge, Frisbee Sheffield, Robert Eaglestone

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Hegel's ideas on history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom, and whether we enjoy more freedom now than those in past centuries.

26 May 2022

listen ↗

Featuring: Sally Sedgwick, Robert Stern, Stephen Houlgate

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the ancient Greek thinker Heraclitus, immortalised by later scholars as the Weeping Philosopher.

8 December 2011

listen ↗

Featuring: Angie Hobbs, Peter Adamson, James Warren

Melvyn Bragg discusses Thomas Hobbes, the great 17th century philosopher who famously said that ungoverned man lived a life that was ‘solitary, poor, brutish and short’.

1 December 2005

listen ↗

Featuring: Quentin Skinner, David Wootton, Annabel Brett

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the growing prominence of the philosophy of one of the most celebrated novelists of the 20th century, who developed her ideas in response to WWII.

21 October 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Anil Gomes, Anne Rowe, Miles Leeson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Kant's ideas on how the world depends on us, on the limits of human knowledge and why we are bound to ask questions we cannot answer.

3 June 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Fiona Hughes, Anil Gomes, John Callanan

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rich and radical ideas of Soren Kierkegaard, often called the father of Existentialism.

20 March 2008

listen ↗

Featuring: Jonathan Rée, Clare Carlisle, John Lippitt

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, meditations and reputation of this stoic and philosopher king, who Machiavelli called the last of the 'Five Good Emperors'.

25 February 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Simon Goldhill, Angie Hobbs, Catharine Edwards

Melvyn Bragg discusses Karl Marx who once said that while other philosophers wanted to interpret the world, he wanted to change it. And he changed the world with his Communist Manifesto.

14 July 2005

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Francis Wheen, Gareth Stedman Jones

Melvyn Bragg discusses the 19th century political philosopher John Stuart Mill and his treatise On Liberty which is one of the sacred texts of liberalism.

18 May 2006

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Janet Radcliffe Richards, Alan Ryan

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of Michel de Montaigne. Best known for his influential Essays, Montaigne is regarded as the father of modern sceptical thought.

25 April 2013

listen ↗

Featuring: David Wootton, Terence Cave, Felicity Green

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Nietzsche's influential ideas about what it means to be moral.

12 January 2017

listen ↗

Featuring: Stephen Mulhall, Fiona Hughes, Keith Ansell-Pearson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and ideas of the Russian prince who became an anarchist and who argued that mutual aid was the key to evolution not survival of the fittest

24 February 2022

listen ↗

Featuring: Ruth Kinna, Lee Dugatkin, Simon Dixon

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss arguably the most personal of Plato's dialogues in which he examines the values that led to the execution of his mentor Socrates by drinking hemlock

25 November 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Angie Hobbs, Frisbee Sheffield, Fiona Leigh

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosopher Karl Popper, author of The Open Society and a seminal thinker about science.

8 February 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: John Worrall, Anthony O'Hear, Nancy Cartwright

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas and influence of the Greek mathematician Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans.

10 December 2009

listen ↗

Featuring: Ian Stewart, Serafina Cuomo, John O'Connor

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss medieval English scholar Roger Bacon, an early pioneer of science who became known as Doctor Mirabilis.

20 April 2017

listen ↗

Featuring: Jack Cunningham, Amanda Power, Elly Truitt

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Rousseau's ideas on how to educate children so they retain their natural selves and are not corrupted by society.

10 October 2019

listen ↗

Featuring: Richard Whatmore, Caroline Warman, Denis McManus

Melvyn Bragg discusses the life and works of French novelist, playwright and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

7 October 2004

listen ↗

Featuring: Jonathan Rée, Benedict O'Donohoe, Christina Howells

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and his extraordinary influence.

29 October 2009

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Beatrice Han-Pile, Christopher Janaway

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Seneca: philosopher, playwright, tutor to Nero, one of the first great writers born in the new Roman empire after the fall of the Republic.

23 February 2017

listen ↗

Featuring: Mary Beard, Catharine Edwards, Alessandro Schiesaro

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the French philosopher and social activist Simone Weil. Admired by Albert Camus and Iris Murdoch, she achieved a great deal in her short life.

15 November 2012

listen ↗

Featuring: Beatrice Han-Pile, Stephen Plant, David Levy

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Simone de Beauvoir - her work on existentialist ethics, philosophy and literature and her influence on feminism.

22 October 2015

listen ↗

Featuring: Christina Howells, Margaret Atack, Ursula Tidd

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the iconic Greek philosopher Socrates. He is the founder of Western philosophy, he was funny, irritating and rude but left not a single word in his own hand.

27 September 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: Angie Hobbs, David Sedley, Paul Millett

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosopher Spinoza whose profound and complex ideas about God had him celebrated as an atheist in the 18th century.

3 May 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: Jonathan Rée, Sarah Hutton, John Cottingham

Melvyn Bragg discusses the life of Siddhartha Gautama, the originator of Buddhism, and examines why his teachings have now become one of the fastest growing religions of the Western world.

14 March 2002

listen ↗

Featuring: Peter Harvey, Kate Crosby, Mahinda Deegalle

Melvyn Bragg discusses the life and times of the 19th century Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, whose novels such as War and Peace gave expression to the compelling moral and social questions of their day.

25 April 2002

listen ↗

Featuring: A. N. Wilson, Catriona Kelly, Sarah Hudspith

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Al-Kindi, often described as the first philosopher in the Arabic tradition.

28 June 2012

listen ↗

Featuring: Hugh Kennedy, James Montgomery, Amira Bennison

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Aldous Huxley's dystopian 1932 novel Brave New World and its vision of a future of test tube babies, free love and round-the-clock surveillance.

9 April 2009

listen ↗

Featuring: David Bradshaw, Daniel Pick, Michèle Barrett

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosopher Averroes who worked to reconcile the theology of Islam with the rationality of Aristotle, achieving both fame and infamy.

5 October 2006

listen ↗

Featuring: Amira Bennison, Peter Adamson, Anthony Kenny

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Avicenna, among the most important philosophers in the history of Islam.

8 November 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: Peter Adamson, Amira Bennison, Nader El-Bizri

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the scientist, writer, printer, diplomat and American founding father Benjamin Franklin.

1 March 2012

listen ↗

Featuring: Simon Middleton, Simon Newman, Patricia Fara

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas of Henri Bergson on how our experience of time as a duration differs from the scientific measurement of time, and why that matters.

9 May 2019

listen ↗

Featuring: Keith Ansell-Pearson, Emily Thomas, Mark Sinclair

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the influential 20th-century British thinker Bertrand Russell, widely regarded as one of the founders of Analytical philosophy.

6 December 2012

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Mike Beaney, Hilary Greaves

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosophy of Confucius, a body of ideas which, more than any other philosophy, has defined what it is to be Chinese.

1 November 2001

listen ↗

Featuring: Frances Wood, Tim Barrett, Tao Tao Liu

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of David Hume, the philosopher and leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment.

6 October 2011

listen ↗

Featuring: Peter Millican, Helen Beebee, James Harris

Melvyn Bragg discusses the great German polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe - novelist, dramatist, poet, humanist, scientist and philosopher.

6 April 2006

listen ↗

Featuring: Tim Blanning, Sarah Colvin, W. Daniel Wilson

Melvyn Bragg assesses the scientific legacy of the 18th century German poet and thinker Goethe, who gave us the term morphology and is sometimes even credited with inventing biology itself.

10 February 2000

listen ↗

Featuring: Nicholas Boyle, Simon Schaffer

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas of Hannah Arendt who examined totalitarianism and politics and, when covering the Eichmann trial, explored 'the banality of evil'.

2 February 2017

listen ↗

Featuring: Lyndsey Stonebridge, Frisbee Sheffield, Robert Eaglestone

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Hegel's ideas on history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom, and whether we enjoy more freedom now than those in past centuries.

26 May 2022

listen ↗

Featuring: Sally Sedgwick, Robert Stern, Stephen Houlgate

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the ancient Greek thinker Heraclitus, immortalised by later scholars as the Weeping Philosopher.

8 December 2011

listen ↗

Featuring: Angie Hobbs, Peter Adamson, James Warren

Melvyn Bragg discusses Thomas Hobbes, the great 17th century philosopher who famously said that ungoverned man lived a life that was ‘solitary, poor, brutish and short’.

1 December 2005

listen ↗

Featuring: Quentin Skinner, David Wootton, Annabel Brett

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the growing prominence of the philosophy of one of the most celebrated novelists of the 20th century, who developed her ideas in response to WWII.

21 October 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Anil Gomes, Anne Rowe, Miles Leeson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Kant's ideas on how the world depends on us, on the limits of human knowledge and why we are bound to ask questions we cannot answer.

3 June 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Fiona Hughes, Anil Gomes, John Callanan

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rich and radical ideas of Soren Kierkegaard, often called the father of Existentialism.

20 March 2008

listen ↗

Featuring: Jonathan Rée, Clare Carlisle, John Lippitt

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, meditations and reputation of this stoic and philosopher king, who Machiavelli called the last of the 'Five Good Emperors'.

25 February 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Simon Goldhill, Angie Hobbs, Catharine Edwards

Melvyn Bragg discusses Karl Marx who once said that while other philosophers wanted to interpret the world, he wanted to change it. And he changed the world with his Communist Manifesto.

14 July 2005

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Francis Wheen, Gareth Stedman Jones

Melvyn Bragg discusses the 19th century political philosopher John Stuart Mill and his treatise On Liberty which is one of the sacred texts of liberalism.

18 May 2006

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Janet Radcliffe Richards, Alan Ryan

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of Michel de Montaigne. Best known for his influential Essays, Montaigne is regarded as the father of modern sceptical thought.

25 April 2013

listen ↗

Featuring: David Wootton, Terence Cave, Felicity Green

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Nietzsche's influential ideas about what it means to be moral.

12 January 2017

listen ↗

Featuring: Stephen Mulhall, Fiona Hughes, Keith Ansell-Pearson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and ideas of the Russian prince who became an anarchist and who argued that mutual aid was the key to evolution not survival of the fittest

24 February 2022

listen ↗

Featuring: Ruth Kinna, Lee Dugatkin, Simon Dixon

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss arguably the most personal of Plato's dialogues in which he examines the values that led to the execution of his mentor Socrates by drinking hemlock

25 November 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Angie Hobbs, Frisbee Sheffield, Fiona Leigh

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosopher Karl Popper, author of The Open Society and a seminal thinker about science.

8 February 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: John Worrall, Anthony O'Hear, Nancy Cartwright

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas and influence of the Greek mathematician Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans.

10 December 2009

listen ↗

Featuring: Ian Stewart, Serafina Cuomo, John O'Connor

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss medieval English scholar Roger Bacon, an early pioneer of science who became known as Doctor Mirabilis.

20 April 2017

listen ↗

Featuring: Jack Cunningham, Amanda Power, Elly Truitt

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Rousseau's ideas on how to educate children so they retain their natural selves and are not corrupted by society.

10 October 2019

listen ↗

Featuring: Richard Whatmore, Caroline Warman, Denis McManus

Melvyn Bragg discusses the life and works of French novelist, playwright and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

7 October 2004

listen ↗

Featuring: Jonathan Rée, Benedict O'Donohoe, Christina Howells

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and his extraordinary influence.

29 October 2009

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Beatrice Han-Pile, Christopher Janaway

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Seneca: philosopher, playwright, tutor to Nero, one of the first great writers born in the new Roman empire after the fall of the Republic.

23 February 2017

listen ↗

Featuring: Mary Beard, Catharine Edwards, Alessandro Schiesaro

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Simone de Beauvoir - her work on existentialist ethics, philosophy and literature and her influence on feminism.

22 October 2015

listen ↗

Featuring: Christina Howells, Margaret Atack, Ursula Tidd

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the iconic Greek philosopher Socrates. He is the founder of Western philosophy, he was funny, irritating and rude but left not a single word in his own hand.

27 September 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: Angie Hobbs, David Sedley, Paul Millett

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosopher Spinoza whose profound and complex ideas about God had him celebrated as an atheist in the 18th century.

3 May 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: Jonathan Rée, Sarah Hutton, John Cottingham

Melvyn Bragg discusses the life of Siddhartha Gautama, the originator of Buddhism, and examines why his teachings have now become one of the fastest growing religions of the Western world.

14 March 2002

listen ↗

Featuring: Peter Harvey, Kate Crosby, Mahinda Deegalle

Melvyn Bragg discusses the life and times of the 19th century Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, whose novels such as War and Peace gave expression to the compelling moral and social questions of their day.

25 April 2002

listen ↗

Featuring: A. N. Wilson, Catriona Kelly, Sarah Hudspith

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosopher Averroes who worked to reconcile the theology of Islam with the rationality of Aristotle, achieving both fame and infamy.

5 October 2006

listen ↗

Featuring: Amira Bennison, Peter Adamson, Anthony Kenny

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Avicenna, among the most important philosophers in the history of Islam.

8 November 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: Peter Adamson, Amira Bennison, Nader El-Bizri

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosophy of Confucius, a body of ideas which, more than any other philosophy, has defined what it is to be Chinese.

1 November 2001

listen ↗

Featuring: Frances Wood, Tim Barrett, Tao Tao Liu

Melvyn Bragg discusses the achievements of Charles Dickens What is his political and literary legacy to our age?

12 July 2001

listen ↗

Featuring: Rosemary Ashton, Michael Slater, John Bowen

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the work of the philosopher, politician and writer Edmund Burke, whose views on revolution in America and France were hugely influential.

3 June 2010

listen ↗

Featuring: Karen O'Brien, Richard Bourke, John Keane

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and ideas of the writer of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, one of the most celebrated works of its kind.

17 June 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: David Womersley, Charlotte Roberts, Karen O’Brien

Melvyn Bragg discusses the great German polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe - novelist, dramatist, poet, humanist, scientist and philosopher.

6 April 2006

listen ↗

Featuring: Tim Blanning, Sarah Colvin, W. Daniel Wilson

Melvyn Bragg assesses the scientific legacy of the 18th century German poet and thinker Goethe, who gave us the term morphology and is sometimes even credited with inventing biology itself.

10 February 2000

listen ↗

Featuring: Nicholas Boyle, Simon Schaffer

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas of Hannah Arendt who examined totalitarianism and politics and, when covering the Eichmann trial, explored 'the banality of evil'.

2 February 2017

listen ↗

Featuring: Lyndsey Stonebridge, Frisbee Sheffield, Robert Eaglestone

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Hegel's ideas on history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom, and whether we enjoy more freedom now than those in past centuries.

26 May 2022

listen ↗

Featuring: Sally Sedgwick, Robert Stern, Stephen Houlgate

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of the Argentinian master of the short story, Jorge Luis Borges.

4 January 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: Edwin Williamson, Efraín Kristal, Evelyn Fishburn

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce's groundbreaking 1916 novel about growing up in Catholic Ireland.

26 November 2009

listen ↗

Featuring: Roy Foster, Katherine Mullin, Jeri Johnson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Kant's ideas on how the world depends on us, on the limits of human knowledge and why we are bound to ask questions we cannot answer.

3 June 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Fiona Hughes, Anil Gomes, John Callanan

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rich and radical ideas of Soren Kierkegaard, often called the father of Existentialism.

20 March 2008

listen ↗

Featuring: Jonathan Rée, Clare Carlisle, John Lippitt

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.

23 May 2013

listen ↗

Featuring: Adam Kuper, Christina Howells, Vincent Debaene

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, meditations and reputation of this stoic and philosopher king, who Machiavelli called the last of the 'Five Good Emperors'.

25 February 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Simon Goldhill, Angie Hobbs, Catharine Edwards

Melvyn Bragg discusses Karl Marx who once said that while other philosophers wanted to interpret the world, he wanted to change it. And he changed the world with his Communist Manifesto.

14 July 2005

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Francis Wheen, Gareth Stedman Jones

Melvyn Bragg examines the literary and political career of the 17th century poet John Milton, examining work such as Paradise Lost as well as his role as propagandist during the English Civil War.

7 March 2002

listen ↗

Featuring: John Carey, Lisa Jardine, Blair Worden

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of Michel de Montaigne. Best known for his influential Essays, Montaigne is regarded as the father of modern sceptical thought.

25 April 2013

listen ↗

Featuring: David Wootton, Terence Cave, Felicity Green

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Nietzsche's influential ideas about what it means to be moral.

12 January 2017

listen ↗

Featuring: Stephen Mulhall, Fiona Hughes, Keith Ansell-Pearson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and ideas of the Russian prince who became an anarchist and who argued that mutual aid was the key to evolution not survival of the fittest

24 February 2022

listen ↗

Featuring: Ruth Kinna, Lee Dugatkin, Simon Dixon

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss arguably the most personal of Plato's dialogues in which he examines the values that led to the execution of his mentor Socrates by drinking hemlock

25 November 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Angie Hobbs, Frisbee Sheffield, Fiona Leigh

Melvyn Bragg discusses the life and achievements of the 19th century French novelist Marcel Proust whose 3000 page work À La Recherche du Temps Perdu has been called the definitive modern novel.

17 April 2003

listen ↗

Featuring: Jacqueline Rose, Malcolm Bowie, Robert Fraser

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas and influence of the Greek mathematician Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans.

10 December 2009

listen ↗

Featuring: Ian Stewart, Serafina Cuomo, John O'Connor

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Rousseau's ideas on how to educate children so they retain their natural selves and are not corrupted by society.

10 October 2019

listen ↗

Featuring: Richard Whatmore, Caroline Warman, Denis McManus

Melvyn Bragg discusses the life and works of French novelist, playwright and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

7 October 2004

listen ↗

Featuring: Jonathan Rée, Benedict O'Donohoe, Christina Howells

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and his extraordinary influence.

29 October 2009

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Beatrice Han-Pile, Christopher Janaway

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Simone de Beauvoir - her work on existentialist ethics, philosophy and literature and her influence on feminism.

22 October 2015

listen ↗

Featuring: Christina Howells, Margaret Atack, Ursula Tidd

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the iconic Greek philosopher Socrates. He is the founder of Western philosophy, he was funny, irritating and rude but left not a single word in his own hand.

27 September 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: Angie Hobbs, David Sedley, Paul Millett

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosopher Spinoza whose profound and complex ideas about God had him celebrated as an atheist in the 18th century.

3 May 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: Jonathan Rée, Sarah Hutton, John Cottingham

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Chinese military adviser Sun Tzu from the 6th century BC and the influential work of military strategy associated with him, The Art of War.

1 March 2018

listen ↗

Featuring: Hilde de Weerdt, Tim Barrett, Imre Galambos

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Alexis de Tocqueville and his study of the American democratic system, written as an example to France of how democracy might develop there.

22 March 2018

listen ↗

Featuring: Robert Gildea, Susan-Mary Grant, Jeremy Jennings

Melvyn Bragg discusses the life and times of the 19th century Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, whose novels such as War and Peace gave expression to the compelling moral and social questions of their day.

25 April 2002

listen ↗

Featuring: A. N. Wilson, Catriona Kelly, Sarah Hudspith

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the remarkable philosopher and critic whose ideas, developed in the 1930s, became highly influential after his death while escaping the Holocaust.

10 February 2022

listen ↗

Featuring: Esther Leslie, Kevin McLaughlin, Carolin Duttlinger

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Max Weber's book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

27 March 2014

listen ↗

Featuring: Peter Ghosh, Sam Whimster, Linda Woodhead

Melvyn Bragg discusses how Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the greatest philosophers of the modern age has influenced contemporary culture with his ideas on language.

4 December 2003

listen ↗

Featuring: Ray Monk, Barry Smith, Marie McGinn

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosopher Averroes who worked to reconcile the theology of Islam with the rationality of Aristotle, achieving both fame and infamy.

5 October 2006

listen ↗

Featuring: Amira Bennison, Peter Adamson, Anthony Kenny

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the scientist, writer, printer, diplomat and American founding father Benjamin Franklin.

1 March 2012

listen ↗

Featuring: Simon Middleton, Simon Newman, Patricia Fara

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the influential 20th-century British thinker Bertrand Russell, widely regarded as one of the founders of Analytical philosophy.

6 December 2012

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Mike Beaney, Hilary Greaves

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of David Hume, the philosopher and leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment.

6 October 2011

listen ↗

Featuring: Peter Millican, Helen Beebee, James Harris

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the work of the philosopher, politician and writer Edmund Burke, whose views on revolution in America and France were hugely influential.

3 June 2010

listen ↗

Featuring: Karen O'Brien, Richard Bourke, John Keane

Melvyn Bragg discusses the great German polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe - novelist, dramatist, poet, humanist, scientist and philosopher.

6 April 2006

listen ↗

Featuring: Tim Blanning, Sarah Colvin, W. Daniel Wilson

Melvyn Bragg assesses the scientific legacy of the 18th century German poet and thinker Goethe, who gave us the term morphology and is sometimes even credited with inventing biology itself.

10 February 2000

listen ↗

Featuring: Nicholas Boyle, Simon Schaffer

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas of Hannah Arendt who examined totalitarianism and politics and, when covering the Eichmann trial, explored 'the banality of evil'.

2 February 2017

listen ↗

Featuring: Lyndsey Stonebridge, Frisbee Sheffield, Robert Eaglestone

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Hegel's ideas on history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom, and whether we enjoy more freedom now than those in past centuries.

26 May 2022

listen ↗

Featuring: Sally Sedgwick, Robert Stern, Stephen Houlgate

Melvyn Bragg discusses Thomas Hobbes, the great 17th century philosopher who famously said that ungoverned man lived a life that was ‘solitary, poor, brutish and short’.

1 December 2005

listen ↗

Featuring: Quentin Skinner, David Wootton, Annabel Brett

Melvyn Bragg and guests Robert Hoyland, Robert Irwin and Hugh Kennedy discuss the life and ideas of the 14th-century Arab philosopher of history Ibn Khaldun.

4 February 2010

listen ↗

Featuring: Robert Hoyland, Robert Graham Irwin, Hugh N. Kennedy

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the growing prominence of the philosophy of one of the most celebrated novelists of the 20th century, who developed her ideas in response to WWII.

21 October 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Anil Gomes, Anne Rowe, Miles Leeson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Kant's ideas on how the world depends on us, on the limits of human knowledge and why we are bound to ask questions we cannot answer.

3 June 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Fiona Hughes, Anil Gomes, John Callanan

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.

23 May 2013

listen ↗

Featuring: Adam Kuper, Christina Howells, Vincent Debaene

Melvyn Bragg discusses Karl Marx who once said that while other philosophers wanted to interpret the world, he wanted to change it. And he changed the world with his Communist Manifesto.

14 July 2005

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Francis Wheen, Gareth Stedman Jones

Melvyn Bragg discusses the 19th century political philosopher John Stuart Mill and his treatise On Liberty which is one of the sacred texts of liberalism.

18 May 2006

listen ↗

Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Janet Radcliffe Richards, Alan Ryan

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and work of Michel de Montaigne. Best known for his influential Essays, Montaigne is regarded as the father of modern sceptical thought.

25 April 2013

listen ↗

Featuring: David Wootton, Terence Cave, Felicity Green

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas of the French political philosopher (1689-1755) whose work on liberty and republicanism, banned at home, influenced the US constitution.

14 June 2018

listen ↗

Featuring: Richard Bourke, Rachel Hammersley, Richard Whatmore

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Nietzsche's influential ideas about what it means to be moral.

12 January 2017

listen ↗

Featuring: Stephen Mulhall, Fiona Hughes, Keith Ansell-Pearson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life and ideas of the Russian prince who became an anarchist and who argued that mutual aid was the key to evolution not survival of the fittest

24 February 2022

listen ↗

Featuring: Ruth Kinna, Lee Dugatkin, Simon Dixon

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss arguably the most personal of Plato's dialogues in which he examines the values that led to the execution of his mentor Socrates by drinking hemlock

25 November 2021

listen ↗

Featuring: Angie Hobbs, Frisbee Sheffield, Fiona Leigh

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosopher Karl Popper, author of The Open Society and a seminal thinker about science.

8 February 2007

listen ↗

Featuring: John Worrall, Anthony O'Hear, Nancy Cartwright

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss medieval English scholar Roger Bacon, an early pioneer of science who became known as Doctor Mirabilis.

20 April 2017

listen ↗

Featuring: Jack Cunningham, Amanda Power, Elly Truitt

Melvyn Bragg discusses the life and works of French novelist, playwright and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

7 October 2004

listen ↗

Featuring: Jonathan Rée, Benedict O'Donohoe, Christina Howells

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and his extraordinary influence.

29 October 2009

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Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Beatrice Han-Pile, Christopher Janaway

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosopher Spinoza whose profound and complex ideas about God had him celebrated as an atheist in the 18th century.

3 May 2007

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Featuring: Jonathan Rée, Sarah Hutton, John Cottingham

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense, which was published in 1776 and bolstered support for American independence.

21 January 2016

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Featuring: Kathleen Burk, Nicholas Guyatt, Peter Thompson

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the American 19th century writer and philosopher, Henry David Thoreau

15 January 2009

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Featuring: Kathleen Burk, Tim Morris, Stephen Fender

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Alexis de Tocqueville and his study of the American democratic system, written as an example to France of how democracy might develop there.

22 March 2018

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Featuring: Robert Gildea, Susan-Mary Grant, Jeremy Jennings

Melvyn Bragg discusses the life and times of the 19th century Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, whose novels such as War and Peace gave expression to the compelling moral and social questions of their day.

25 April 2002

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Featuring: A. N. Wilson, Catriona Kelly, Sarah Hudspith

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the remarkable philosopher and critic whose ideas, developed in the 1930s, became highly influential after his death while escaping the Holocaust.

10 February 2022

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Featuring: Esther Leslie, Kevin McLaughlin, Carolin Duttlinger

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Max Weber's book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

27 March 2014

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Featuring: Peter Ghosh, Sam Whimster, Linda Woodhead

Melvyn Bragg and guests Jonathan Ree, John Haldane and Gwen Griffith-Dickson discuss The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James.

13 May 2010

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Featuring: Jonathan Rée, John Haldane, Gwen Griffith-Dickson

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of Al-Kindi, often described as the first philosopher in the Arabic tradition.

28 June 2012

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Featuring: Hugh Kennedy, James Montgomery, Amira Bennison

Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosopher Averroes who worked to reconcile the theology of Islam with the rationality of Aristotle, achieving both fame and infamy.

5 October 2006

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Featuring: Amira Bennison, Peter Adamson, Anthony Kenny

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Avicenna, among the most important philosophers in the history of Islam.

8 November 2007

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Featuring: Peter Adamson, Amira Bennison, Nader El-Bizri

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the scientist, writer, printer, diplomat and American founding father Benjamin Franklin.

1 March 2012

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Featuring: Simon Middleton, Simon Newman, Patricia Fara

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas of Henri Bergson on how our experience of time as a duration differs from the scientific measurement of time, and why that matters.

9 May 2019

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Featuring: Keith Ansell-Pearson, Emily Thomas, Mark Sinclair

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the influential 20th-century British thinker Bertrand Russell, widely regarded as one of the founders of Analytical philosophy.

6 December 2012

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Featuring: A. C. Grayling, Mike Beaney, Hilary Greaves

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the philosopher George Berkeley, one of the most significant thinkers of the 18th century.

20 March 2014

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Featuring: Peter Millican, Tom Stoneham, Michela Massimi

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of David Hume, the philosopher and leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment.

6 October 2011

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Featuring: Peter Millican, Helen Beebee, James Harris

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Roman physician and medical theorist Galen.

10 October 2013

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Featuring: Vivian Nutton, Helen King, Caroline Petit

Melvyn Bragg discusses the great German polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe - novelist, dramatist, poet, humanist, scientist and philosopher.

6 April 2006

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Featuring: Tim Blanning, Sarah Colvin, W. Daniel Wilson

Melvyn Bragg assesses the scientific legacy of the 18th century German poet and thinker Goethe, who gave us the term morphology and is sometimes even credited with inventing biology itself.

10 February 2000

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Featuring: Nicholas Boyle, Simon Schaffer

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas of Hannah Arendt who examined totalitarianism and politics and, when covering the Eichmann trial, explored 'the banality of evil'.

2 February 2017

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Featuring: Lyndsey Stonebridge, Frisbee Sheffield, Robert Eaglestone

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Hegel's ideas on history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom, and whether we enjoy more freedom now than those in past centuries.

26 May 2022

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Featuring: Sally Sedgwick, Robert Stern, Stephen Houlgate

Melvyn Bragg discusses Thomas Hobbes, the great 17th century philosopher who famously said that ungoverned man lived a life that was ‘solitary, poor, brutish and short’.

1 December 2005

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Featuring: Quentin Skinner, David Wootton, Annabel Brett

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Kant's ideas on how the world depends on us, on the limits of human knowledge and why we are bound to ask questions we cannot answer.

3 June 2021

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Featuring: Fiona Hughes, Anil Gomes, John Callanan

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.

23 May 2013

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Featuring: Adam Kuper, Christina Howells, Vincent Debaene